Asking journalists for articles before publishing

My name is Monica Rosenfeld. I’m a professional speaker and the founder of WordStorm PR. In today’s video, I’m going to be talking about whether it’s appropriate to ask a journalist who’s interviewed you for a story whether you can see that article before it goes to print. The short answer is no, it’s not appropriate, and I’ll tell you why.

Imagine you’re a journalist who has to write and pump out several articles in a short time frame and put them to print. Now imagine you had to go to everyone you interviewed to get their approval for what you’ve written and if all those people come back with changes and edits and you actually have to sit down and go through that and make those changes before you can put it to print, this would all take way too much time and nothing would ever get published.

But I know what you’re thinking. What if the article is riddled with inaccuracies? Can you go back to the journalist then and ask them to change it? And the answer here is yes you most certainly can. No matter all the sub-editors and editors in every media outlet, mistakes definitely do slip through. So if you go to the journalist and ask them to correct it, particularly if it’s an online outlet or media outlet, they will go back, change it quickly and hopefully it will all clear up in a very short period of time.

So in summary, yes you can go back and ask them to change inaccuracies, but if you want to build a positive relationship with a journalist whatever you do, don’t ask to see the article before it goes to print. Thank you for your time, I hope this has been useful. Feel free to ask me any questions as always, and look forward to seeing you next week.